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Gabrielle Hamilton, Cooking With Words

It’s hard to think of another American chef who has outdone Gabrielle Hamilton in converting the humblest of stages into the heftiest of reputations. The restaurant she opened in downtown Manhattan in 1999, Prune, has barely enough room for the 30 diners it squeezes in at brunch, lunch and dinner, and despite the reliable presence of dozens of additional customers waiting on the sidewalk, she has either escaped or resisted the itch for expansion that so many of her contemporaries scratch and scratch. Prune has no annex or uptown sibling; there is no Prune Dubai. Just this one cramped, irresistible nook with its scuffed floors, nicked tables and servers in pink.

And yet Hamilton’s renown among, and even beyond, the food cognoscenti is huge. That’s principally because what she has championed at Prune — hearty comfort food prepared to a gourmet’s standards and served in a manner so unceremonious that the utensils don’t always match — foreshadowed some of the most prominent dining trends of the day. It owes something as well to her success as a woman in a field still dominated by men. But there’s another explanation: Hamilton can write. For many years now, she has popped up in prominent publications as the author of eloquent, spirited glimpses into the heart, mind and sweaty labor of a chef. So the growing ranks of the restaurant-obsessed have been able to feast not only on her deviled eggs but also on her prose.

After much anticipation, the inevitable memoir has arrived. “Blood, Bones and Butter” traces nearly all of Hamilton’s life and career, from an unmoored childhood through her triumph at Prune, which didn’t end the search for a sense of place and peace that is the overarching theme of this autobiography, as of so many others. It’s a story of hungers specific and vague, conquered and unappeasable, and what it lacks in urgency (and even, on occasion, forthrightness) it makes up for in the shimmer of Hamilton’s best writing.

Recalling her mother’s penchant for heavy eyeliner, she flashes back to “the smell of the sulfur every morning as she lit a match to warm the tip of her black wax pencil.” Hamilton invokes the “voluptuous blanket of summer night humidity,” captures the tantalizing promise of delicate ravioli by observing that “you could see the herbs and the ricotta through the dough, like a woman behind a shower curtain,” and compares breast feeding to being cannibalized, “not in huge monster-gore chunks, but like a legion of soft, benign caterpillars makes lace of a leaf.”

There are rhapsodic passages aplenty about eating and cooking, and while such reveries can easily seem forced or trite, hers ring sweetly true. She’s recounting actual rapture, not contriving its facsimile on cue. You can feel her amazement as her father roasts whole lambs on a spit and her awe at the dexterity with which the chef André Soltner pulls off a perfect omelet, using only a fork. Readers with limited appetites for food porn, beware. This is one salacious expedition into the folds of orecchiette and fine points of puntarelle. Hamilton’s obvious belief that all the world can be refracted through its edible components is so complete that it leads, in a few instances, to sentences that almost come across as satires of food writing. “I had no clue that my parents were unhappy with each other until I was sweeping up cornichons and hard salami and radishes off the kitchen floor” is the opening line of a chapter chronicling her parents’ breakup. Her family is coming apart, and still she’s taking inventory of their larder.

Photo

Gabrielle Hamilton at her restaurant, Prune.Credit
Ashley Gilbertson/VII Network, for The New York Times

That happens early in the book, following an account of growing up in a bucolic part of Pennsylvania along the Delaware River, and it flags the onset of drift and delinquency. During Hamilton’s teenage years, her parents are often gone or distracted, and at times she’s left to fend for herself. She lies about her age to get dishwashing work. She steals. And by age 16, she’s made her way to Manhattan, an early graduate from an alternative high school doing battle with the platoons of cockroaches in a Hell’s Kitchen apartment she shares with her older sister.

She winds up waiting tables, and that, along with the dishwashing, establishes the book’s main leitmotif: time and again she is drawn — pulled, really — back to the world of food and hospitality. It happens even when she struggles against it, a battle suggested by the book’s subtitle, “The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef.” Economic necessity is the proximal reason, but not the real one. Through feeding people Hamilton exerts control over a life rendered chaotic and undependable when her parents split; she takes care of others in the way her parents didn’t take care of her. This is clearest in her description of opening Prune, which illuminates how much more than menu planning goes into the creation of a restaurant. Hamilton is guided by nostalgia and yearning, and wants above all to forge an emotional connection with her guests.

She’s funny about the pretensions of other restaurants, proclaiming that Prune would “never serve anything but a martini in a martini glass. Preferably gin.” And she’s blunt about the moment-to-moment drudgery of running the place. While Anthony Bourdain’s memoir “Kitchen Confidential” only purported to deglamorize restaurant work, then went on to give it a naughty, swashbuckling romanticism, Hamilton takes you out back behind Prune, where, all alone, she discovers and disposes of a rat swollen with maggots. No sane reader will aspire to this.

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She is blunt as well about how tedious she finds discussions of gender in the workplace, how insufferable she considers the self-satisfied milieu at the farmers’ market and how surreal, ludicrous and, yes, exhilarating she deems the celebrity-chef treatment. But that candor draws attention to its absence on other fronts. For many years she is coupled and, according to a throwaway phrase, madly in love with a woman she meets while in Michigan to do graduate work in creative writing, but she says little else about the relationship, and doesn’t wrestle in a satisfying way with the questions raised by her affair with, then marriage to, a man. He and she live apart even after the birth of their two children, and this arrangement is initially addressed with a frustrating casualness. Even later, when she examines the marriage further, it remains opaque, though his Italian lineage and their sojourns in Apulia give her the material for the last, too leisurely quarter of the book.

Hamilton may, justifiably, not want her focus to swerve from the kitchen to the bedroom, but she winds up seeming selectively guarded and evasive, and maybe a bit careless. In many places the book cries out for connective tissue that’s missing, and there are specific omissions that throw a reader off balance. Although elated by her entry into that graduate program, Hamilton doesn’t say what she writes there — even as she’s being caustically dismissive of her classmates’ efforts. And when her mother reappears in the book after a long absence, Hamilton vents a fury at her that she hasn’t set the stage for.

A more general anger and even disdain for other people’s vanities and inconsistencies flicker throughout the book. They undercut her likability as a narrator, though she’s redeemed time and again by her self-reliance, her industriousness and her observant, clever storytelling. She notes that less than a week after tackling the maggoty rat, she was on her way in a black town car to Martha Stewart’s television show for a cooking demonstration. And she returns toward the end of the book to those ravioli, revealing only then that what lay inside was terrible. Her timing is perfect, her metaphor clear and her point indisputable. Sometimes pasta and people don’t make good on all the hope you have invested in them.

BLOOD, BONES AND BUTTER

The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

By Gabrielle Hamilton

291 pp. Random House. $26.

Frank Bruni, a former restaurant critic for The Times, is the author of “Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite.”

A version of this review appears in print on March 13, 2011, on Page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Marrow of Life. Today's Paper|Subscribe